A Closer Look at Gandhi’s Campaigns in India

Yesterday
I gave my opinion that violent struggle for political change in the United
States was unwise and likely to be counterproductive. But I also expressed
frustration at the ingrained ineffectiveness of today’s nonviolent protests,
and tried to imagine what an effective nonviolent resistance might look like.

I’m not a doctrinaire pacifist the way Gandhi was. I can imagine causes I
would kill for as well as those I would die for. And yet it seems to me that
we’re more likely to reach the goal worth aiming for — and I’m speaking here
practically and not just idealistically — through nonviolent means.

I recommended yesterday that “[p]eople who are committed to (or who prefer)
nonviolence and who regret the rise of the ‘black bloc’ and other violent
protesters should ask how Gandhi prevented the Indian National Congress from
choosing the tactics of those in India who were advocating armed insurrection.”

“The answer,” I suggested, was that Gandhi “was more hard-core than they were,
and he demonstrated results.” But I decided to take my own advice and take a
closer look, since I’m not a scholar of the Indian independence movement. I
picked up some facts of interest, both about the practical appeal of Gandhi’s
program to an Indian National Congress with lofty and concrete goals, and
about the importance of, yes, tax resistance in that program.

If we step into the Wayback Machine, we’ll see an India that was fighting for
its independence against a hypocritically blind and openly imperalist British
empire. Jawaharlal Nehru remembered:

I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the British
people for making their moral standards correspond with their material
interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial
designs. [SNC 160]

The violent struggle for independence in India, which Nehru initially
supported, predates Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha
techniques. In fact Gandhi’s first use of these new tactics in India were in
response to the British administration’s draconian anti-terrorist laws which
had in turn been designed to fend off the violent independence movement (and
which sound awfully familiar):

In late 1918 the Rowlatt Bills were
promulgated. Their intent was to control a few wartime manifestations of
terrorism and to prevent their recurrence during the postwar period… They
incensed Indians and provided a focal point for resistance. The bills made
trial without jury permissible for political offenses and extended to the
provincial authorities the right to intern suspected terrorists without
trial. On the day they were to become law, Gandhi, fresh from a victorious
campaign in Champaran… proposed a nationwide hartal.
[SNC 163]

The hartal was something akin to a general strike. The
“victorious campaign in Champaran” was Gandhi’s first Indian
satyagraha campaign, conducted when he was a newcomer on the
political scene without a lot of “cred.” He had been acting independently of
existing resistance organizations as the founder of his own group called the
“Satyagraha Sabha” because, in his words, “all hope of any of the existing
institutions adopting a novel weapon like Satyagraha seemed to me to be in
vain” [GAA 456]

The Raj responded to Gandhi’s new national campaign and the outrage over the
Rowlatt Bills with violent reprisals, which included perpetrating the vicious
Amritsar massacre and imprisoning Gandhi for
two years. Gandhi’s first national
campaign of non-cooperation went nowhere.

Yet ten years later the Indian National Congress
decided against a violent revolutionary movement and chose Gandhi as its
commander-in-chief for the coming independence struggle. One of Gandhi’s first
acts in this capacity was to lead “what amounted to both a training exercise
and a preliminary skirmish” [SNC 166] in Bardoli:

The farmers and peasants of Bardoli were being asked to pay a 22 percent
land tax increase after a particularly bad agricultural year. [Vallabhbhai]
Patel led them in withholding all taxes until the increase was rescinded.
Solidarity was enforced in part through a social boycott of nonresisters. The
movement lasted from 12 February until
6 August, and ended with the resisters paying the tax into a
government escrow account, pending an investigation of the fairness of the
tax. The investigation found that the tax was not justified, and it was
withdrawn.

The Bardoli experiment demonstrated the power of disciplined collective
action. Nonpayment of taxes was an extremely aggressive act and subject to
harsh penalties. [SNC 166–7]

Gandhi and the Indian National Congress took heart at this victory. Gandhi
wrote about the British: “You have great military resources. Your naval power
is matchless. If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be
unable to do so, but… we cease to play the part of the ruled. You may, if you
like, cut us to pieces. You may shatter us at the cannon’s mouth. If you act
contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know
that you cannot move one step forward.”
[PNVA 84]

The key, according to Gandhi, was in withdrawal of cooperation. “We recognize…
that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence. We
will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all
voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil
disobedience, including nonpayment of taxes. We are convinced that if we can
but withdraw our voluntary help and stop payment of taxes without doing
violence, even under provocation, the end of inhuman rule is assured.”
[PNVA 84]

The goals of the Indian National Congress were lofty. “This was the first
campaign in which immediate and unconditional independence for India emerged
as the explicit objective and it mobilized more Indians for direct action in
the service of that objective than any other single campaign”
[SNC 157].
And the rhetoric was correspondingly confrontational. Gandhi wrote: “sedition
has become the creed of the Congress… Noncooperation, though a religious and
strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government,
and is therefore legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code”
[PNVA 85].

Gandhi felt that “civil disobedience, once begun this time, cannot be stopped
and must not be stopped as long as there is a single resister left free or
alive.” This was not a pasttime for hobbyists or cowards. Tens of thousands
were arrested. Hundreds killed. Protesters had to be willing to be beaten with
steel-tipped canes without even raising a hand to ward off the blows.

The first concentrated target of these protests was the
Salt Act:

The existence of a government monopoly on salt, resulting from the
1836Salt Act,
perfectly exemplified the perceived evils of colonial rule. Paying the tax on
salt (and thereby providing much of the revenue to run the colonial regime)
was more a mild irritant than a desperate hardship for most. But why pay the
bill for their own subjugation?
[SNC 172]

Gandhi also tried to extend this campaign to a boycott of foreign liquor and
fabric. Wearing homespun clothing (and thereby damaging the economy of
occupation while at the same time encouraging self-reliance) became a symbol
of resistance.

The Salt March, the Dharasana salt factory confrontation (one of the climactic
scenes you may remember from Gandhi the movie), and
“also the entire Salt Satyagraha campaign, were, technically, utter failures”
when seen from the point-of-view of the lofty goals — that is, complete
independence. “Yet now we know that this bloody climax made India’s freedom
inevitable, because it showed what the Satyagraha volunteers were made of, and
what the oppressive system of government that the British had imposed on India
was made of”
[ITNOW 113]

Perhaps this is an example of the tendency of losers to use clever fantasy
redefinitions to turn their losses into victories, a tendency I complained
about on The Picket Lineyesterday. But it’s true that India did
gain its independence, though more than a decade
later, and it’s hard to look at the historical record and not conclude
that Gandhi’s campaigns made Indian independence inevitable.

And it’s also true that Indians like Jawaharlal Nehru, who was not initially a
proponent of nonviolent resistance, came to have respect for the effectiveness
of the technique:

We had accepted that method, the Congress had made that method its own,
because of a belief in its effectiveness. Gandhiji had placed it before the
country not only as the right method but as the most effective one for our
purpose… In spite of its negative name it was a dynamic method, the very
opposite of a meek submission to a tyrant’s will. It was not a coward’s
refuge from action, but a brave man’s defiance of evil and national
subjection. [PVNA 87]

Would that we could say the same for the nonviolent resistance movement in
the United States today.

[GAA]

Gandhi, Mohandas K.
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with
Truth1957 Beacon

[ITNOW]

Nagler, Michael N.
Is There No Other Way?: The Search for a Nonviolent
Future2001 Berkeley Hills

[PNVA]

Sharp, Gene
The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Part One — Power and
Struggle1973 Porter Sargent

[SNC]

Ackerman, Peter &
Kruegler, Christopher Strategic Nonviolent Conflict:
The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century1994 Praeger Publishers

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